In joint meetings held in 1963–4 the Chinese committed themselves to defend North Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. Mao chided his North Vietnamese comrades that they were ‘just scratching the surface . . . Best turn it into a bigger war.’ He reassured them that ‘if the United States attacks the North, they will have to remember that the Chinese also have legs, and legs are used for walking’. He did not add that he was quite capable of sending his troops into North Vietnam without Hanoi’s permission.15 The PLA initially moved air and anti-aircraft artillery forces into the vicinity of the border with North Vietnam, and used the British to communicate to Washington the circumstances in which they would certainly be used. At the same time Mao reduced China’s own vulnerabilities by relocating arms industries from the coast to the interior, diverting four million people to the endeavour.
Hanoi had no intention of becoming a Chinese puppet and proved adroit at exploiting the deepening animosities between Beijing and Moscow. After the fall of Khrushchev the Soviets delivered $670 million in mainly military aid.16 Even before the US bombing of the North began, the Soviets supplied SAM-75 missile batteries and 2,500 men to defend Hanoi, while the Chinese sent 100,000 combat engineers to improve and repair roads and railways more rapidly than the US could bomb them. These were followed, from August 1965, by 150,000 Chinese troops to man an enormous number of anti-aircraft artillery batteries. Vast quantities of food and war materials flowed south too, as well as everything from harmonicas to ping-pong balls. The result was a competition to see who could support Hanoi most, with Hai Phong harbourmasters juggling which fraternal nation’s ships could dock first. After the Chinese Red Flag was shot up by US aeroplanes as a result of being left loitering offshore while priority was given to Soviet ships, Beijing belatedly realized what was going on. By that time the massive reinforcement it had received permitted North Vietnam to launch a major offensive to topple the Saigon regime before the US intervened on the ground.17
On 1 November 1964 the Viet Cong struck a US Air Force base at Bien Hoa, where a squadron of old B-57 bombers was parked, destroying six planes and killing five US personnel. Seventy-six more were wounded. Although this incident, two days before the US election, brought no overt response, it did finally tip Ambassador Maxwell Taylor into recommending a major bombing campaign. The idea was to create a greater sense of stability in the South, enabling General Khanh and his colleagues to clean up their act. Although Johnson had declared that he had had enough of ‘this coup shit’, when Khanh made overtures to the Buddhists to form a broader coalition government he had to go because the Buddhists wanted the Communists included with an eye to a negotiated conclusion to the war, which would end with the US being requested to withdraw its forces. In January 1965 Khanh was forced to resign by Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Changh Thi, who overthrew the trappings of civilian government. Ky in turn pushed out Thi. ‘Mac’ Bundy thought them the absolute bottom of the barrel, but they were not. Still to come was General Nguyen Van Thieu, who outmanoeuvred Ky to become the Americans’ final man on horseback at the end.
In a last attempt to grasp the situation, on 4 February 1965 ‘Mac’ Bundy paid his first visit to Saigon, though he had been in post for four years. Everything seemed in a state of atrophy and, of course, the Viet Minh kidnapped a senior embassy official to coincide with his arrival. Three days into his visit, the Viet Minh attacked a US helicopter base at Pleiku, killing eight Americans and wounding 126 more. The base hospital resembled a charnel house. The Viet Minh used captured US mortars to destroy ten helicopters on the ground. They must have been sure the US would not respond since Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was in Hanoi at the time. They were wrong.
All the big local players, Taylor, Westmoreland and Deputy Chief of Mission Alexis Johnson, assembled in the MACV command centre to review the attack. Bundy contacted the White House, where Johnson summoned an expanded NSC meeting including the leaders of the House and the Senate. They overwhelmingly approved Bundy’s request for retaliatory bombing, and 132 planes were launched from carriers and headed for North Vietnam. After a visit to Pleiku, where he was moved by a very young wounded US soldier, Bundy flew back to Washington drafting a recommendation for a policy of ‘sustained reprisal’ that had been in the works for months. As he said to a reporter, attacks like Pleiku were ‘like street cars’ – it was just a matter of which one you chose to board.18
Johnson opted for Operation Flaming Dart, which targeted select North Vietnamese regular army barracks. The Viet Minh responded with an attack on a US base at Qui Nhon, killing twenty-three Americans, for which more retaliatory sorties were flown to demolish further barracks. The Soviets were infuriated that the attacks had begun while Kosygin was in Hanoi, and on 10 February Kosygin and the North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong issued a joint communiqué that condemned the attacks and committed the Soviet Union to giving ‘all necessary aid and support’ to North Vietnam to resist US aggression. This was followed in April 1965 by a further agreement signed in Moscow to provide and maintain what was to become the most comprehensive missile defence in the world.
The reason for the second agreement was that, realizing that Flaming Dart was having no deterrent effect, the Joint Chiefs unfurled Operation Rolling Thunder, a much more sustained campaign involving hitting ninety-four designated targets two days a week over two months. It was a compromise, a calibrated campaign to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate rather than Curtis LeMay’s wish for an all-out offensive against the Red River irrigation dykes and other crucial economic targets.
The first planes struck on 2 March, against communications links between Hanoi and southern Vinh, part of a wider effort to destroy transportation choke points and supply dumps. While US planes usually destroyed the targets, the problem was that the enemy soon repaired the damage, or simply found other routes for a logistical effort that relied more on beasts of burden and on human porters. Only thirty-four tons of supplies a day were required for the 6,000 men they were moving south each month. North Vietnamese logistical dispersion meant that an air campaign that was supposed to be under strict civilian control soon involved giving pilots the freedom to bomb targets of opportunity, and the greater use of napalm to inflict horrifying human casualties.
As was already evident from the attacks on Bien Hoa and Pleiku, increasing the number of air bases in Vietnam would require further ground troops to defend them. One general estimated 15,000 more soldiers just to defend a greater-than-mortar-range perimeter around Pleiku. On 8 March Johnson acceded to Westmoreland’s request for two battalions of Marines to defend the air base at Da Nang, and they came ashore with howitzers and tanks. Johnson believed he could control future escalation until he found the force levels that broke North Vietnam’s will to fight. As he put it, ‘I’m going up old Ho Chi Minh’s leg an inch at a time.’19 The seventy-five-year-old Ho, meanwhile, had become a largely symbolic figurehead, living in a simple stilt house in Hanoi, where he did his morning calisthenics and fed carp. While careful to never fall out with the Soviets, Ho spent more time in China, including his birthdays, as, whatever his private distrust of the Chinese, Mao’s oft-repeated willingness to unleash a third world war was the ultimate guarantor that Johnson would not invade the North.
The Chinese successfully tested their first nuclear bomb on 16 October 1964. Zhou Enlai urged 3,000 comrades to rejoice in the Great Hall of the People, while Mao penned celebratory verses: ‘Atom bomb goes off when it is told / Ah, what boundless joy!’20 Johnson’s military advisers reported that nothing short of a nuclear strike on Lop Nor would be certain to degrade China’s atomic capacity in perpetuity.21 Instead, Johnson pressed on with combating nuclear proliferation in conjunction with the Soviet Union. The price included reassuring regional allies from Australia to India that the US would defend them against a nuclear-armed China. If the US abandoned South Vietnam, it was believed, then either China would become a Pacific hegemon or else nu
clear weapons would proliferate among US allies anxious to prevent this outcome. These considerations were a largely unspoken and usually overlooked reason for the decision to pound North Vietnam with conventional ordnance.22
Before March 1965 had passed, Westmoreland sought two divisions of infantry to protect Saigon, and the Joint Chiefs said why not send three? On 1 April Johnson approved a further 18,000–20,000 increase in military support personnel, plus two more battalions of Marines and a Marine air squadron. US forces were now to be deployed in offensive counter-insurgency operations for the first time, venturing forth on fruitless patrols that became carelessly routinized until, on the twentieth such patrol, they were ambushed and shot to pieces. On 19–20 April, key US policy-makers convened in Honolulu, where they recommended a 150 per cent increase from 33,500 troops in the country to 82,000. CIA warnings that such an increase would fail to impact significantly on the Viet Minh were ignored. At the same time, Operation Rolling Thunder was extended from eight weeks to six months or a year ‘at the present tempo’, turning Vietnam into ‘a lush tropical bombing range’. In June, Westmoreland requested a further 93,000 troops – bringing his force to 175,000 – for there was still no sign that the Viet Minh were prepared to throw in the towel.23
None of this involved a declaration of war, nor had Congress sanctioned anything beyond what had been conceded in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf affair. Mounting opposition to what was afoot by influential columnists spread to a few brave Congressmen. When Senator George McGovern, who had flown thirty-nine bombing missions in the Second World War, tried to remonstrate with him Johnson replied, ‘Goddamn it, George, you and [Senator William] Fulbright and all you history teachers. I haven’t got time to fuck around with history. I’ve got boys on the line. I can’t be worried about history when there are boys out there who might die before morning.’ Not for the last time, personalizing wars in this way as a ‘blood sacrifice’ by boy soldiers ensured that they continued. Johnson made a few concessions to the idea that bombing was related to negotiations, and Bundy suggested that he announce a South-east Asia Development Corporation designed to pump money into the region and to make South Vietnam as prosperous as South Korea.24
But the only money being pumped into Vietnam was the $700 million Johnson requested in May for US military operations. Instead of bolstering South Vietnamese military performance, increased US involvement was matched by a rising frequency of ARVN defeats whenever they encountered Viet Minh forces, now augmented by NVA regulars. Like a primitive man first encountering a screw in a baulk of wood, the US response was to apply more force. The number of fighter-bomber sorties over the North rose from 3,600 to 4,800, while B-52s were used to carpet-bomb enemy-held areas in the South. By the end of 1968, the US had dropped a million tons of bombs on South Vietnam and 643,000 tons on the North. The war had become one of attrition and endurance, though television reported only a sanitized version of helicopters landing and taking off, not the terrifying reality out in the jungles.
Final Straw
Marine Lieutenant-General Charles Cooper’s 2002 memoir Cheers and Tears contains a unique account of a row between Johnson and the Joint Chiefs after they had requested a private meeting, a rarely exercised right to speak to him directly about their differences of opinion with their titular superior McNamara. Cooper was the junior officer required to hold up the large map brought by Admiral David McDonald. Johnson did not invite the Chiefs to sit while their Chairman General Earle Wheeler spoke for them. Wheeler briefly recommended mining Haiphong harbour, blockading the North Vietnamese coast and unleashing B-52s against Hanoi as an alternative to raising the stakes in the losing land war in the South. McDonald spoke in support of the navy and General John McConnell for the air force. Johnson quietly asked Generals Harold Johnson (army) and Wallace Greene (Marines) if they, whose services had the most to gain or lose, fully supported these ideas. After they had said they did:
Seemingly deep in thought, President Johnson turned his back on them for a minute or so, then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded . . . He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their ‘military advice’. Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names – shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes – and used the F-word as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.
Then came the crucial test of moral courage, which even after nearly forty years Cooper did not appreciate that the Joint Chiefs had failed. Johnson asked each in turn what they would do if they were the president of the United States. Each in turn echoed Wheeler’s reply to the effect that they could not put themselves in Johnson’s shoes and that it was his decision and his alone. ‘President Johnson, who was nothing if not a skilled actor, looked sad for a moment, then suddenly erupted again, yelling and cursing . . . He told them he was disgusted with their naive approach, and that he was not going to let some military idiots talk him into World War III [and] ended the conference by shouting “Get the hell out of my office!”’ Cooper concluded that ‘the Joint Chiefs of Staff had done their duty’. Not so. After a scene like that they should have resigned. By clinging to office they confirmed Johnson’s low opinion of them.
The result was that Johnson insisted on being briefed on military operations in real time as well as concerning each US combat death. The phone buzzed throughout the night, reducing the limited rest of a man who worked eighteen hours a day. Locked into what became a personal conflict, the President lost sight of the whys and wherefores of so much effort. Deep depression set in. He hammered the bottle. Any impact that bombing had on North Vietnamese industrial output was neutralized by massive Soviet resupply and the presence of Chinese troops who helped with reconstruction. Including $6 billion in lost planes, every dollar of damage the US caused was costing it $9.60 to inflict.25
Nothing the Americans did could stop the Viet Minh from using the 600-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail, on which huge quantities of supplies were moved, loaded on backs both human and animal and on modified bicycles. The war came to be seen in terms of US material versus Vietnamese spirit, a line that proved potent propaganda. But what the Bay of Pigs had done to American prestige in its Latin American backyard, Vietnam did in the wider global neighbourhood. Everything the US did damned it as an imperialist power and, however harsh that verdict may seem, since Vietnam it has stuck, being duly attached even to administrations as leftist (in the American context – centre-rightist in the costive spectrum of British politics) as those of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
This is not to be wondered at. If this book has achieved no other purpose, I hope it has illuminated the fact that the perceived imperatives of world power shaped the foreign policy of the USA quite as much as they did its European imperialist predecessors. The central contradiction addressed by this book has not been between Americans ideals and practice, but the fact that, unlike the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires, the USA profited little and lost much from its misconceived adoption of liberal imperialism. For the Europeans it was an alibi adopted to prolong their imperial delusions; the ‘best and the brightest’ of the American liberal establishment were confident that they could do it better, and in that hubris lay their own and their nation’s tragedy. That antipathy to empire was in America’s DNA was not the least of history’s ironies, a lesson it is relearning even as the writing of this book paralled the withdrawals from contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, and popular Western domestic disenchantment with improving small wars in what are no longer faraway places, but have become some of the most dynamic economies of the twenty-first-century world.
EPILOGUE: LEGACIES
DEAN ACHESON resumed his career as a Washington lawyer in 1953, while
being periodically invited to advise successive US governments, and died of a heart attack at home on his Sandy Spring farm in 1971. He was seventy-eight.
HOUARI BOUMÉDIÉNE deposed Ahmed Ben Bella, President of Algeria, in 1965. Ben Bella lived under strict house arrest until 1980 when he was exiled to Lausanne. After a decade he returned to Algeria. He acted as the chairperson of the African Union’s Council of the Wise, before his death on 11 April 2012 aged ninety-three.
RAÙL CASTRO took over the Cuban presidency from the ailing Fidel in 2006, though at the time of writing the latter is still alive too, judging from a private audience in Havana in 2012 with Pope Benedict XVI. An aspirin remains a rare item in Cuba, and mulattos and blacks feel oppressed. Since a BBC journalist wept over the death of Yasser Arafat, one can anticipate the rending of garments and pulling out of hair when Fidel finally shuffles off his mortal coil.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK died in 1975 aged eighty-seven. He and his KMT successors ran Taiwan as a one-party state until the start of the second millennium, although its current multi-party system is being held up as a future paradigm for China’s own democratization. Some have wondered – should Chiang’s and Mao Zedong’s ghosts haunt contemporary China – which of them would be more approving or disapproving of what they saw.
CHIN PENG, leader of the Malayan Communist Party, at the time of writing still lives in unrepentant exile in southern Thailand. A film about his life, The Last Communist, was banned in Malaysia in 2006.
WINSTON CHURCHILL died aged ninety on 24 January 1965 at his home Chartwell in Kent. Following a state funeral in which East End dockside cranes dipped in his honour, he was buried at Bladon, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 58
